


The Recklessness of Water

by sistermichael



Category: What We Do in the Shadows (TV)
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Canon-Typical Violence, Catholic Guilt, Cryptids, Emotional Constipation, Established Relationship, La Llorona Ships It, Light Angst, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Pre-Season/Series 02, complexity and ambiguity baby!, the architectural history of Staten Island
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:08:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28186671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sistermichael/pseuds/sistermichael
Summary: Nandor stumbles across La Llorona and decides that it’s Guillermo’s problem.Unfortunately, he’s right.(Also known as "Cryptid Encounters of the Emotionally-Constipated Kind.")
Relationships: Guillermo de la Cruz/Nandor the Relentless
Comments: 8
Kudos: 44





	The Recklessness of Water

**Author's Note:**

> Why I, an ex-Catholic who is not great at being around moving water, decided to write this is totally beyond me. See endnotes for water-and-guilt-related content warnings. 
> 
> A million thanks to [ UpstartCrow42 ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UpstartCrow42) and [ andyandnormski ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/andyandnormski) for word-wrangling this sucker, and to the Nandermo discord for excellent cryptid discussion. All mistakes are my own. I can be found on The Tumblr @sistersasquatch. 
> 
> Title is from R.E.M.'s "Nightswimming."

“And she was shrieking like anything. I mean, _really_ going for it.” Nandor marvels, spreading his hands apart as if to demonstrate the size of a fish he’s caught. Guillermo, who’s been dragged away from a direly-needed scrubdown of the cell for this particular breathless performance, isn’t so sure that the gesture should apply to ghosts.

“Right. Okay. And you saw her…”

“I told you, at the beach! I was waiting in the bushes for joggers to come by. There are so many of them in the days after New Year’s and they are so very slow. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, except the fish are full of hope and turkey.” Nandor flops down on the couch. It creaks dangerously.

“And she was…”

Nandor gives a frustrated snort. “Down by the water, wailing and moaning.”

Guillermo considers. “Are you sure it wasn’t a human just having a bad time?”

Nandor gives him a look so judgmental it’s bordering on pity. “Guillermo, please. I am well-versed in the occult.”

“Did she threaten you in any way?”

“No.”

“…no?”

“I mean, I got horrible indigestion from the screaming. You know how it is.”

Guillermo, unfortunately, does know how it is. He sinks down onto the sofa next to Nandor. “Let me get this straight. This, uh...entity that you saw didn’t interact with you in any way, but you think it’s my business?”

“Of course it’s your business! She’s one of yours.”

“One of mine?”

“Speaks in tongues!”

“As in…she speaks a language that you don’t and you for some reason look upon that with suspicion despite being an immigrant yourself?”

Nandor sniffs haughtily. “Woman, long white dress, wailing and speaking in tongues by the water? Sounds like your scene.”

“Shit.”

It is, unfortunately, very much Guillermo’s scene.

*

Guillermo does not want to go. The semester of community college that he squeezed in before he took up being browbeaten by vampires full-time told him that, globally speaking, lots of folktales were cooked up to disincentivize young children from doing anything that might get them killed. They’re pragmatic, designed to serve a particular societal need.

If Nandor saw who Guillermo thinks he saw, though, Guillermo is in no way, shape, or form willing to test that theory. Nandor, however, begs and wheedles until Guillermo agrees to go check it out if only to get him to shut up for five goddamn seconds.

The beach is close enough that they can walk; even though half of Guillermo’s brain is in full-fledged panic, the other half is enjoying setting off through the city with Nandor at his side. (This job has made him very good at compartmentalization). As the winding, mansion-strewn streets settle into a more predictable grid of ugly 70s duplexes, Guillermo finds himself savoring it, this brief glimpse of normalcy: just out for a late-night walk with his weird European boss, pointing out cats and bizarre new construction and the moon, huge and yellow in the sky. The shopfronts on the main streets they cross are dark, occasional flashes of light spilling out with the open-and-shut of nightclub doors, illuminating bouncers dozing on their stools outside. The quiet thunder of the waves becomes louder as they draw nearer the bay.

The beach is nearly empty. There are a few people necking and/or doing drugs in the distance and a stray jogger crosses their path, but it’s too late and too cold for any but the most devoted and/or desperate of beachgoers. This isn’t Nandor’s usual hunting grounds—Guillermo knows that he prefers places that are quiet and secret, where he can vanish into the trees with his quarry and eat in privacy. For the last two hundred years, Staten Island has been an ever-shifting map of Nandor’s coverts, sparser and smaller and more precious today than when the island was still mostly farmland.

With no small amount of grumbling at each other, Nandor and Guillermo stow themselves behind/sort of inside a bush on the edge of the sand and settle down to wait. Nandor provides little to nothing by way of body heat, but being a vampire’s familiar is a better crash course in preparedness than the Boy Scouts and Guillermo has come equipped with pockets full of handwarmers and a giant flask of tea that may or not also have whiskey in it. 

“So what is it, exactly, that you want me to do if we actually see her?” Guillermo whispers between sips of tea.

Nandor opens and closes his mouth like a goldfish, apparently totally at a loss. Guillermo facepalms. 

“I just want you to see,” says Nandor quietly and rather lamely, looking off across the sand.

They’re very close to each other, the gentle roar of the surf washing over them. There are definitely twigs poking Guillermo in the ass, but it’s worth it. Guillermo sighs and settles further into the bush.

His tea is almost three quarters gone and the moon is blazing high in the sky when Nandor’s hand at his elbow startles him out of his reverie.

“There!” hisses Nandor, pointing.

And there she is. Guillermo just about loses his damn mind. The last decade of his life has gone by in a sad slog of supernatural horseshit beyond his wildest dreams, but something about seeing a figure straight from the pages of his own childhood is freaking him the fuck out. 

La Llorona is young—early twenties, maybe, and from the days when having a load of kids before you were out of your teens meant you were deemed by society a good wife rather than a welfare queen. She’s wailing, in the sort of outpouring of emotion that Guillermo never feels equipped to handle, ever . Guillermo can barely make out the words over the rush of water and through the woman’s screams of agony, but Nandor is looking at him expectantly so he gives it a try.

“ _Mis hijos_ is…my children,” he begins haltingly. _“Donde estan, preciosos?_ is, uh… Where are you, my precious ones? and _disculpame_ is…forgive me.”

“Yeesh,” marvels Nandor in what is a very judgmental tone for someone currently hiding in a bush and creeping on someone else’s anguish. 

Guillermo eyes him. “Do you know the story?”

“No, why would I?” kvetches Nandor, not taking his eyes off the figure on the shore.

Guillermo heaves a long-suffering sigh. “ _La Llorona_ means ‘the wailing woman.’ As the story goes, a woman saw her husband cheating on her so she drowned their children in a fit of rage and despair. Now she roams around crying out for them and trying to drown people. That’s the gist of it, anyway. Lots of people have their own variations.”

“She killed them, but now she misses them and wants them back,” Nandor states flatly.

“Yes,” says Guillermo. He’s gearing up to dish out an explanation of the complexity of the human psyche when Nandor surprises him by nodding grimly.

“Do you think she’ll ever find them?”

“Uh…no. I think the idea is that she’s not able to find them and she’s doomed to haunt the earth for eternity as punishment.”

“Well, I don’t want her _lurking!”_ And just like that, Nandor is back to his peevish, short-sighted self. 

“We’re in a public place. And I would argue that eldritch beings are in fact part of the public.”

“How will I eat with her standing there pissing and moaning like that?”

“…eat someplace else? Or, I don’t know, put on headphones? She’s not going to hurt you.”

“Isn’t she?”

Guillermo realizes he doesn’t actually know. “Uh, probably not. Just don’t let her drag you under the water, I guess. I’m not sure of the mechanics.”

Nandor heaves an exasperated sigh.

“Look, I believe you, I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” Guillermo pacifies in a whisper. “You win. Let’s get out of here. I’m sure you can find something quick to eat when the nightclubs let out.” He stands. The whiskey has gone to his head a little bit; he would’ve noticed it sooner, but being in close proximity to Nandor is a similar enough sensation that the gentle drunkenness seems to have gotten masked.

He forgot how noisy extricating oneself from a bush is. That, or La Llorona has supersonic hearing. Either way, she turns and stares directly at Guillermo. 

Her face is…well, Guillermo doesn’t quite know how to describe it, in hindsight. It’s not melting off or crawling with worms of any of that stock-in-trade horror movie stuff, but it’s so contorted with grief and rage as to be nearly inhuman. It reminds Guillermo of his mother falling apart when her sister got caught by Immigration for not having papers—that first sickening horror of seeing someone insensible, wailing and gasping and wild with a loss that’s cleaving them open at the seams, and not knowing what to do. 

“ _Shit,_ ” Guillermo and Nandor hiss in unison. Nandor grabs Guillermo by the scruff of his neck and bodily hauls him out of the bush; they do a sort of uncoordinated flying lunge through the bushes before Nandor gets a proper grip on Guillermo and drags him away to safety. 

*

When they get home, covered in sand and Guillermo gasping for breath, Nadja and Laszlo are plucking out something on the pianoforte.

“What the tits?” Laszlo asks, rising from the bench. “You both look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Not a ghost,” says Nandor grimly. “She was real, for one thing.”

Guillermo sits down on the sofa, shaken. Sure, he sees lots of scary shit on a daily basis. But this is, as Nandor so charmingly put it, one of his. This puts him back to his childhood apartment in the Bronx, a musty death trap that rattled with the passing subway trains and thumped with the incessant bass of the neighbors’ boombox. His mom didn’t truck much with the supernatural—she believed in it, sure, but she didn’t hammer it home. His abuela was another story entirely: she saw the spirits wherever she looked and was accordingly never more than arms’ reach away from a rosary. (Guillermo’s sister María Isabel, six years his senior, looked on all of it with disdain. Their mother’s great hope, she was ultimately the one who. She has a doctorate in organic chemistry and a job in a shiny government lab in Maryland. Sometimes their elementary school invites her back to give motivational speeches to the students.) Guillermo, for his part, was enthralled by his grandmother’s mysticism, if terrified.

His abuela died when he was in seventh grade, and that was when Guillermo learned that for him, grief meant numbness. It was also when he first sat down in front of the TV in the living room, mentally apologize to all of the saints clustering on the shelves, and popped a Blockbuster copy of _Interview with the Vampire_ into the VCR. His abuela hadn’t wanted to tempt fate by watching anything of the sort, and the living room had been her domain. Still in his funeral clothes and with the quiet of his abuela’s absence ringing sharp around him, Guillermo sat a foot away from TV (it was a small one, okay?) and watched, motionless. That was the first of many viewings.

“She’s one of yours, isn’t she?” asks Nadja. “This wailing woman who drags people under the water?” 

It isn’t the first time someone in Guillermo’s life has assumed him to be responsible for the entirety of Latin American culture, and he’s dead certain it won’t be the last. 

“I mean, she’s from Latin America. I mean, Latin American, uh, belief systems. I mean…” he trails off. “I didn’t actually believe she existed until tonight, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“You’ve never…?” says Nandor and trails off. 

The truth is, Guillermo has—sort of. He got shipped off to Mexico the summer after the tenth grade, which is sort of a rite of passage for the kids of immigrants. It’s to remind them how good they have it in America while also instilling Mexican values while they’re in pivotal window of angst and impressionability in which they’re likely to start wearing pants that sag below their butts and/or join a gang. He stayed with his Tía Veronica and her four noisy children in Jalisco and said a grand total of probably seven words all summer. He read all the Anne Rice books he could smuggle in his duffle bag seven times apiece and went for solitary, angst-ridden, late-night walks.

The town where Tía Veronica lived was alongside el Lago de Chapala; the dirt track alongside the moonlight-silver water was the preferred location for Guillermo’s sulky midnight strolls. It was on one of these walks that he saw who a lesser mortal might peg as Bigfoot. But Guillermo, armed with sixteen years of his abuela’s dire warnings on the subject, knew better. El Chupacabra was bending to the lake to drink, hairy and enormous and vigorously tickling that part of Guillermo’s reptilian brain that says _no bad run away right now._ But he was rooted to the spot. 

He stayed that way until El Chupacabra rose from the water with his face dripping, gave Guillermo a long, calculating look, and faded back from the lakeshore as if on a breath of air.

The instant Guillermo could move again, he fled back to his aunt’s house, feeling not entirely in control of himself. He slipped in through the back door, wincing at the inevitable squeal of the hinges, and lunged into the bedroom he was sharing with his cousin. He got all the way under the covers on the futon and shook like a leaf until the pink light of dawn crept in through the blinds. The enormity of it all was far from lost on him—that, if he could see El Chupacabra drinking from a lake in Mexico, that there might be vampires in New York.

*

Their well of inane questions about spooky Latino shit run dry, Nadja and Laszlo vacate the premises to find their own dinner and Nandor and Guillermo commence the same dance they always do.

“I’m thinking about ripping out that wall between the old pantry and the servants’ quarters,” says Guillermo. “I think it’s rotted anyway, and we could make all that office space.” He’d briefly entertained the idea of running an Airbnb in that part of the house, but the consistent murder on the premises made it logistically unfeasible. 

Nandor makes a noncommittal humming noise. “I suppose.”

“My sister has a ton of leftover wallpaper she’s looking to get rid of. It has watercolor flamingos on it, which could be kind of fun.”

Nandor hums again, then becomes disproportionately interested in something on the side table. “What’s…what are you doing tonight?” he asks, twisting the edge of a throw pillow so hard with a weird amount of force. He’s sprawled on the sofa in a shitty approximation of a casual lounge and looking anywhere but Guillermo.

It’s not rocket surgery figuring out what Nandor wants. It’s what Guillermo wants too; always does, even if the angels of his better nature have some serious opinions about it. So Guillermo rises to his feet, leans over Nandor, and kisses him.

“Upstairs?” Guillermo says softly, pulling back. 

“Upstairs,” agrees Nandor, sounding strangled.

When this sort of thing happens, it’s always in the blue room , because Nandor sleeps in a coffin and Guillermo sleeps in what could generously be called a sliver of something that in a previous life had brief pretensions of being a bed. The blue room would satisfy even the fanciest Gilded Age robber baron; it’s big and ornate, with a four-posted bed hung with draperies and enough candles to give a fire marshal a heart attack. The ceiling, which Guillermo finds himself staring up at more often than not, is some sort of peeling gilt-edged fresco of a hunting scene. He’s given all of the hounds names and absolutely has a favorite (it’s Pecosa, for the record). 

Guillermo’s occasionally wondered why he can’t sleep in the blue room but has never worked up the courage to ask. He works up the courage instead for little things here and there. Tonight, it’s grabbing Nandor’s hand as they walk up the stairs. Nandor flexes his fingers in shock at first, but he doesn’t pull away.

The documentary crew is slated to come back in a few weeks, and there’s been an increased urgency to this of late. It’s unspoken that it doesn’t happen when the cameras are rolling, or even have the faintest chance that they could be—one night early on, Camera One had doubled back to the house because she’d forgotten her hat and Nandor had startled so badly at the knock on the front door that he’d nearly shoved Guillermo into the next dimension in his haste to spring away. 

Even with the luxury of time, they never do anything that can’t be over in the span of a few minutes; they never do anything that requires more than the most cursory of teamwork or any communication beyond “yes?” To put any forethought or analysis into it would cross some sort of line; Guillermo suspects that if he ever introduced anything from a certain aisle of the pharmacy into the mix Nandor would yeet himself directly out the window. It’s as if this is something that flits around the edges of their vision and will vanish forever if looked at head-on.

Nandor, for all his personality screams ‘batshit-crazy diva,’ is a surprisingly considerate lover. Too considerate, at times, shoving Guillermo’s hands away when he tries to reciprocate or refusing to come until Guillermo has. This obstinate generosity is so ridiculous that it seems to come all the way back around and arrive at selfishness. It makes Guillermo unfathomably cross sometimes—which then, of course, pulls him into a vortex of self-flagellation because who the hell does he think he is, to complain about an overly-generous lover? It’s all an elaborate game of chicken whose rules are ever-shifting, anyway: Guillermo can sense sea changes in Nandor’s mood in the bedroom long before the waves break over the shores of the rest of his existence. If nothing else, it’s a handy heads-up.

Tonight, it transpires that what Nandor wants is to make Guillermo forget his own name—which, listen, Guillermo’s not about to argue with. He lets Guillermo put a hand in his hair, but that’s it. He shakes off all other attempts at contact and takes care of himself, in the end, knelt on the floor with his forehead pressed to Guillermo’s thigh. Guillermo’s never quite shaken his tendency to approximate it to prayer. 

*

Afterwards, Guillermo puts himself to rights and steps out the back door—recycling day’s tomorrow and it only took a few undignified sprints to the curb with the bin as the truck rolled up to put him in the habit of taking it out the night before.

And then he stops.

 _“Nandor,_ ” he breathes.

Nandor, stumbling sleepy and sated right behind him, stops. Which is when the wailing begins.

She’s by the pond, betwixt a few particularly lewd topiaries. Guillermo wonders if she gravitates towards water by choice or by compulsion: before she noticed Guillermo standing there, she’d been knelt before the pond and staring into its depths as if transfixed. There are a few scraggly koi in there, plus a drowned raccoon that Guillermo’s been meaning to deal with, but he doesn’t know if she necessarily sees the same things that everyone stuck exclusively on the mortal plane does. 

She redoubles her efforts in the screaming department when she sees Nandor behind Guillermo in the doorway and gets to her feet, extending a hand to them with her palm up. Before she’s can take a step, though, Nandor reaches past Guillermo and slams the door. Guillermo isn’t sure how effective it is against potentially-malevolent spirits (jury’s out), but he’ll take it.

“She followed us home!” hisses Nandor as they do a very undignified speedy shuffle back down the hallway. He’s not what one might call ‘dressed’; his winter-weight dressing gown is barely keeping him on this side of decency. “Does she think we’re her children?”

“Why do you assume I _know these things_ , being Mexican doesn’t mean being _omniscient—_ ” Guillermo gives Nandor a shove into his bedroom under the stairs. The safest room to wait out a hurricane probably isn’t the safest room to wait out La Llorona, but Guillermo’s improvising here. He can still hear the shrieking; he wonders frantically if the neighbors can too and whether they’re about to get a surprise visit from New York’s finest. It’s happened once before; fortunately, the cops took them all for a weird roleplaying polycule and beat a hasty retreat. 

He doesn’t know how long it takes for the screaming to subside, but it feels like an age and a half. Neither one of them has bathed since emerging from the blue room; here, close together and backed up against the edge of Guillermo’s bed, Nandor’s dressing gown open to the waist, it feels different than things usually do. The thing that had been strangest to his inexperienced teenage self about all of this sex business wasn’t necessarily the acts themselves, but that the smell of another person lingered about him until he showered again. He can smell Nandor on himself and himself on Nandor, and it would have been utterly intoxicating were they not currently dealing with a slight problem in the eldritch department.

“We can’t stay in here forever,” says Guillermo at length.

Nandor sighs and slides out of the room, letting the curtain swing shut behind him. His boots echo down the corridor. At length, he returns.

“She’s gone,” he says. “I double-checked.”

Guillermo’s impressed. He knows, technically, that Nandor was a warlord—but that was so very long ago and he’s learned the hard way that those skills don’t necessarily transfer.

*

La Llorona hasn’t come back, but everyone’s on edge. Laszlo and Nadja blame Guillermo, as is par for the course, but at least it means they’re giving him a wide berth in case he summons up anything else from south of the border. When Nandor ventures out to feed, he insists on Guillermo’s company. The two of them walk away from the shore, up the hill and through the last few winding dead-end streets. This time of year, with the trees bare, they can just see the glowing smudge of the Manhattan skyline from the top of Moses Mountain. Nandor leaves Guillermo sitting there while he beats the bushes for joggers (evidently he’s developed a taste for them).

Staten Island had been passing strange when Guillermo moved here all those years ago. Cloistered in a series of tiny, code-breaking apartments in Bronx for his formative years, he’d found the semi-suburban sprawl of the forgotten borough amusing at the best of times, frightening at the worst. He was used to heights, provided one took an elevator to get there and was surrounded by four walls on arrival, but the nighttime pursuit of quarry through the arboreal rustle of hillsides was new. (As was the preponderance of white people.) The fact that they were on an _island_ was unsettling in a strange way, surrounded as they were by water. The only ways out of the borough were by bridge or boat; that Guillermo could not walk out under his own power resulted in a non-zero number of sleepless nights (er, days).

Moses Mountain is not a mountain but rather some trees on top of a pile of rubble cleared for a highway that never happened; to rescue the whole shambolic affair, the infrastructural powers that be threw some landscaping at it and rebranded it as part of Staten Island’s “greenbelt.” It frightened Guillermo at first, but now he’s come to like it, watching the Manhattan skyline in the quiet of failed midcentury development while his master finds someone to eat. He really has no choice, anyway: the Venn diagram of the greenbelt and Nandor’s preferred hunting grounds is pretty much a circle.

“Done,” says Nandor grimly, emerging from the trees. He doesn’t like Guillermo watching him feed; Guillermo doesn’t know why and he’s never asked, for reasons involving a gift horse and its mouth.

“Feel better?” asks Guillermo.

Instead of actually answering, Nandor pounces.

“Ok _aaaaay,_ ” Guillermo begins, trying desperately to play it cool and failing equally desperately because Nandor’s knees have hit the ground and his hands are at Guillermo’s fly and Guillermo’s only so strong, really. 

“Do I want to know what brought this on?” Guillermo gasps out, clutching wildly at the tree behind him. Nandor makes a noise of dissent without losing any focus whatsoever.

Guillermo tries a different tack. “We’re in _public,_ we can’t…” He then lets out an embarrassingly high-pitched noise because Nandor’s suddenly put the pedal to the metal and seven hundred years of sucking people off gives you some _skills._

With a colossally irritated noise, Nandor pulls off him, swings the cape off his own shoulders, and settles it around Guillermo. “For your ridiculous modesty scruples,” he grumps, hitting the deck once again and shaking his head in disbelief.

And, well, fuck it, it turns out that having his master’s century-old velvet cape resting heavy on his shoulders and puddling on the ground around them is _doing_ things to Guillermo. He lets out a strangled sob as Nandor dives back in, belatedly flinging the cloak around both of them.

From there, it’s all a foregone conclusion. Guillermo’s not a teenager anymore, but, look, he knows what he likes and what he likes is a medieval vampire getting him off as if he’s the most important thing in the universe. The city lights blur with the bluish darkness in the distance as Guillermo tries not to think about the less-than-dignified noises he’s probably making right now.

It had been embarrassing, in the bygone days of Guillermo’s teenage servitude, coming as soon as he was touched. Nandor had found it amusing; he’d found it even more amusing that Guillermo could get it up again pretty much instantly. Guillermo had been on the cusp of twenty when he shouldered open the door of the Staten Island house with his paltry duffel bag—the same he’d taken to Jalisco—and it hadn’t taken long for Nandor to figure out that they were both medal-worthy compartmentalizers and could do this quietly and without bleedover into the rest of their lives. And, more to the point, that when confronted with a sexy vampire, Guillermo had had little compunction about dropping trou immediately. Guillermo’s virginity had come and gone in a haze of Nandor pushing him against the crypt door to get his mouth on him, then a gentle touch to the back of Guillermo’s still-swimming head to request reciprocation. The aforementioned reciprocation had been clumsy but welcome, if Guillermo recalls correctly (and he knows he does). 

_Eleven years,_ Guillermo thinks, thirty now and with his master going down on him like it’s a contest he wants to win. The back-to-back orgasms are a thing of the past now, but it’s not like anyone has to last long enough to get inside anybody else. Guillermo has considered—usually when royally pissed off at Nandor—finding a sympathetic guy in a bar to do the deed, just so he knows how it feels, but every time he’s skirted along the edge of such a thing he’s fled immediately, haunted by the idea that he’s being duplicitous, somehow. 

There are more pressing concerns in the present, namely the public sex thing that’s currently going down, pun entirely intended. However, the orgasm that hits him like a freight train belies any protest he may have considered raising. He always shivers uncontrollably after these things, feeling himself spinning out of control. He’s cried a few times, Nandor studiously turning a blind eye. 

“Better?” asks Nandor softly, putting Guillermo to rights underwear-and-pants-wise.

“Yeah,” says Guillermo, because there’s literally nothing left in his brain right now. He makes a few flaily grabs for Nandor’s nether regions but Nandor shakes his head and stands to reclaim his cloak. Once divested, there’s nothing else for Guillermo to do but shrug and start to stumble back down the path towards home. It’s dark and he’s still shivering with aftershocks; Nandor’s got a gentle hand on his lower back, which is probably ultimately more of a hindrance than a help given how distracting it is.

“Not that way,” Nandor whispers when they reach the bottom of the hill. “That’s the pond.”

Right. Right, because they can’t go near water, now that—

“Okay,” Guillermo whispers. “Okay, you have to show me, I’m still—”

He stays a little bit dizzy on the way home, stumbling past horrid McMansions with those goddawful motion-sensor floodlights that wash over them the second they walk past. (They’re of the genre that usually come with a “Live, Laugh, Love” sign and a weirdly large SUV somewhere on the premises.)

When they get home, there’s a cursory check of the pond for La Llorona, who fails to show, and then Guillermo practically throws Nandor into his coffin and yanks the curtains shut. He stumbles back into his room, dazed and confused and _god,_ still longing for touch. So he flings himself under the covers and puts a delusory hand to himself that nonetheless results in a top-quartile orgasm. And then he falls asleep and, miraculously, stays there.

*

Guillermo sticks his head out the back door the next (late) morning while he waits for the coffee to brew and the toast to pop. The pond stares blandly back at him in the cold angle of the winter light, a thin crust of ice having formed atop it overnight. Guillermo glowers a little at it for good measure, then shuts the door and goes hunting for the jam. There’s only a sliver left; he’s in the process of mumbling darkly at it while digging it out with a butter knife when he finally notices that he’s not alone.

“Oh, _come on,_ ” he whines in the general direction of the burbling coffeepot. “That barely counts as water and you know it.” 

La Llorona quirks an unimpressed eyebrow at him. The traitorous Mr. Coffee seems to be pretty damn judgmental this morning as well. 

“Well, pass me a mug, then,” Guillermo sighs, figuring that if this is his fate, there might as well be caffeine involved. To her credit, she does. To her discredit, it’s the mug Guillermo got handed upon his graduation from a very well-publicized charter high school in the Bronx whose college-graduation rate he singlehandedly fucked up for the next decade. 

The kitchen is a tiny room carved out of the much larger one characteristic of a manorial house of the period. A familiar who’d evidently been a builder before entering into vampiric servitude did the renovation sometimes in the 60s and it shows: the walls are yellow, the backsplash tiles have weird pioneer scenes on them, and the appliances are avocado green and on the verge of shitting the bed once and for all. Guillermo really likes it, actually, the same way he likes all the other pockets of space that two centuries of his predecessors have carved out all over the house. The windows are huge and the winter light floods the room and it’s the one place in the house where the vampires have no interest in coming. Granted, Guillermo’s attempts at cooking usually involve screaming and fire, but otherwise the serenity is nice.

“So what’s this about?” Guillermo asks La Llorona, giving the half-and-half a shake and cracking it open as if they’re in some deranged sitcom where La Llorona is the nosy neighbor that likes to pop into his kitchen unannounced. “I hate to break it to you, but a seven-hundred-fifty-year-old vampire is statistically unlikely to be your kid, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

She doesn’t say anything, just gets up on one of the counter stools and perches there. The flowing white skirts only get marginally tangled up in the process.

“Unless you’re not looking for your actual kids,” Guillermo says slowly. Considering he hasn’t actually had coffee yet, that’s damn near genius. “What, is this a duckling-imprinting thing? You saw Nandor and me and thought, _yep, that’ll do_?” He says ‘duckling-imprinting’ in English because fuck him if he knows the Spanish for that one; La Llorona looks at him blankly. He takes a huge sip of coffee in the hope that caffeine will help him out here. It doesn’t, but you can’t blame him for trying. “You’re looking for a surrogate family and we were your best option? Help me out here, I’ve got nothing.”

Instead of answering, La Llorona rises and goes to the door. Guillermo watches with interest—it’s not clear exactly how corporeal she is, and he’s not stupid or desperate enough to try reaching out and checking.

She fumbles helplessly with the janky knob, which answers that question pretty neatly. “Hard twist to the left,” Guillermo calls, taking another sip of his coffee. She looks back at him plaintively. “Hit it with your knee if it’s not going,” he adds, leaning over to put another slice of bread in the toaster.

She hits it with her knee, to little effect.

“Harder,” he sighs.

She glares, but another good thump and the door springs open with a squeal of protest. Instead of leaving, though, she holds it open and looks expectantly at him. 

“You want me to go with you?” asks Guillermo, stunned and terrified in equal measure.

She nods.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

She reaches out one hand, plaintively.

“I’m sorry,” he says, not moving from the stool. “I can’t. I can’t risk you pulling me under.” 

She stares. He stares. The toaster pops loudly into the silence, which startles both of them.

Just like that, she’s gone.

*

He doesn’t want to tell Nandor what happened, but he doesn’t feel like he has much choice: Nandor’s love of cryptids and lack of critical thinking skills means he’d probably cheerily follow La Llorona to the beach and not notice anything was amiss till he got dragged under. 

“She wanted to take you somewhere?” Nandor furrows his brow. “But where?”

Guillermo eyes him. “Wherever there’s water, I guess. So that she can pull me under.”

“But _why?_ ” Nandor taps his rook pensively on the chessboard. Guillermo’s slightly glad for the reprieve from the thrashing Nandor’s been giving him.

“What do you mean, _why?_ ”

“Well, what will she do with you once she has you underwater? I don’t think she’d have much use for you. Unless she plans on eating you, which I would think she could do just fine on land.” Nandor moves the rook into position. He’d somehow gotten it into his head that Guillermo required a classical education, and chess was part of the deal. 

Guillermo realizes he has absolutely no idea how to answer that question. “I…I thought the point was the actual act of pulling people under, not what happens afterwards.”

Nandor clucks at him, which is a really bold move for someone who only yesterday got into a shouting match with one of those automatic solar-powered recycling bins . “And that would make sense how?”

Guillermo buries his face in his hands. “I don’t know!”

“Because, if I understand you correctly, this woman is looking for the children she murdered, only to want to drown strangers? Wouldn’t her aim to be to reunite with her children—or some facsimile of them—not go on a wild killing spree?”

Guillermo hates it when Nandor starts making sense. “Well, maybe the grief drove her to insanity and now she goes around murdering people by drowning them.”

Nandor rolls his eyes so hard it looks physically painful. “What a lazy explanation. Also, that’s checkmate.” 

*

After Guillermo has acknowledged his thorough defeat and the chess pieces have been put away, they wind up in the blue room again. Guillermo’s still worried about La Llorona, but no other part of his life feels this good, ever, so he rolls with it.

Nandor sits down on the brocaded chaise lounge—seriously, someone in the late 1800s was compensating for something, and Guillermo would really like to know what—and pulls Guillermo into his lap. Guillermo goes willingly, letting Nandor steady him as he settles in.

The kissing’s good; it’s always good, once you learn how to avoid fangs. Nandor likes his hair pulled , however much he might deny it, so Guillermo goes in for that, winding his fingers into it and tugging gently. Nandor lets his head tip backwards with a barely-there whimper that sounds as much anguished as it does eager. 

Guillermo rocks his hips in spite of himself. His body and his brain are clearly not on the same page. Unless it’s one of those pages of the Bible that starts out ‘love thy neighbor’ and ends with ‘then God strafed the shit out of everybody because he didn’t like them.’ He rocks his hips again, chasing the feeling in the hope that it will drown out the cryptid-related panic that’s taken up residence in his head .

Nandor’s still doing his weird touch-me-not generosity thing, squirming away from Guillermo’s attempts to push his cape off his shoulders. Even though Guillermo well knows that he’s encroaching on choosing-beggars territory, it’s starting to really, really piss him off. He brings a hand up to cradle Nandor’s face, but Nandor turns a cheek and looks away, towards the particularly inaccurate _mappa mundi_ on the wall. (There are creepy-looking badgers where Indonesia is supposed to be).

 _Eleven years,_ Guillermo thinks. Eleven years of this intimacy whose insane geopolitics Guillermo can never keep up with. “No?” he says, sitting up all the way.

Nandor doesn’t even give him the benefit of a reply, just sits there looking inscrutable.

It’s not like it’s a fight, or anything. It’s just a slow, sick cascade of grief, a realization that this might not ever be what he needs it to be.

Guillermo slides off his lap and leaves. 

*

Of all the mysteries in his life, it’s not clear why this is the one that Guillermo needs to solve. Maybe it’s that it’s the only one with an open invitation.

It’s a freezing, clear night. Whatever sex-induced flush he had been feeling is dissipating now. It’s not even that late at night. The moon is still low in the sky and there are lights in the windows of the bungalows and split levels that over the decades Nandor has watched creep over the dunes and low hills like Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane. 

The beach is empty; there is no sound save for the crash of the waves and the occasional batshit-crazy scream of a seagull . The fishing pier looms dark and skeletal; Guillermo walks down to the end in the interest of keeping this endeavor as sand-free as possible.

The moon has lost its fullness since he was last here, just a wan sliver in the sky. The water is dark and choppy beyond the end of the pier. Guillermo finds himself holding his breath, as if he’s already underneath it.

“Shit,” he says softly, because he doesn’t know what’s next but he has some extremely uncomfortable suspicions. He hasn’t even brought tea to give this expedition a shred of normalcy. There’s a weird little bench at the end of the pier, presumably for old guys to sit on while they fish and say vaguely misogynistic things about their wives . Guillermo sits down on it, feeling vaguely foolish but mostly sad.

Whatever else can be said about her malevolent intentions, at least La Llorona doesn’t keep you waiting.

“Do you have something to show me? Is that why you wanted me to come here?” Guillermo asks without turning his head.

La Llorona nods and kicks an abandoned Coors Light can into the water. She’s sitting on the railing of the pier, calmly swinging her legs. The moonlight is catching in the gauzy folds of her dress, shimmering like the water.

“Are you going to pull me under?”

She nods again. 

“And I’ll…be okay?”

She gives him an eyebrow of judgment, which Guillermo will admit he 100% deserves. Ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer. She stands up and tightrope-walks over to the front of the pier, where the railing drops to waist height for wheelchair users to fish from. She holds out a hand, which Guillermo takes. Getting up on the ledge with her takes some finagling, grace not being one of Guillermo’s strong points, but eventually they’re both standing more or less upright, Guillermo braced on La Llorona’s arm. He catches an odd, stray whiff of what can only be his mother’s buñuelos, which in hindsight should have been a warning that things were about to get weird.

He takes one look back down the pier at the lights of the shoreline, then forward again. Across the blackness of water is the faint glow of Brooklyn, but it’s a long way off. 

“Okay,” he whispers in a voice he doesn’t quite recognize as his own. “Let’s go.”

They step off the edge together.

The fall isn’t that far—ten feet, maybe—and Guillermo can swim, technically. (More accurately, he can usually stay afloat through a collection of biomechanically-incorrect strategies strung together across a childhood of sporadic visits to city pools and Coney Island.) What he isn’t prepared for, though, is the cold. It makes the impact that much worse, a horrible whole-body concussion that slaps all the air from his lungs and all the strength from his limbs. The cold is searing, overwhelming. There’s an immense pressure on his brain, a horrible roar in his ears like the subway going over the Manhattan Bridge and white exploding behind his eyes.

And then, mercifully, it all fades into stillness. He opens his eyes.

La Llorona is suspended in the water opposite him, glowing with a harsh white light. She’s not even treading water, just floating with the billowing folds of her dress glowing like some sort of very scary jellyfish. They stare at each other across the void.

The respite doesn’t last long. It’s like an underwater volcano has erupted somewhere deep in his chest, billows of smoke and debris coursing across the shock waves. There are shapes in the water, blurry, illuminated only by La Llorona’s glow. Then they resolve, and Guillermo rather wishes they hadn’t.

The first is his mother, shimmering and glowing. He’d left her standing at the threshold of the apartment in the Bronx eleven years ago, having uttered some excuse or other about working as a personal assistant for a reclusive executive. And he’d never been back, ever.

He’d left her—she was gone, and he’d come here and led so many people to their deaths, buried their bodies. It was a morality problem he’d studiously ignored for so long, rationalizing it away with half-formed thoughts of the end justifying the means, of vampires existing on a higher plane.

Those bodies are swirling through the water now, a silvery maelstrom of grotesque human fish. They’re flopping and screaming and, sometimes, deathly still. The shame is surging in Guillermo, blistering and blurring. 

It was, as he’d wondered a thousand times during his tenure in the vampires’ employ, a question of whether he was really good after all. It was the thing he dared not even think in explicit terms, the great cosmic gamble of which he was a part. Sure, he’s always had a _thing_ for vampires on a purely base level, but, if one wanted to get both technical and blasphemous about it, the vampires (and later, the supernatural beings that ranged across New York City) were the closest Guillermo had come to the divine.

The bodies are gone, and out of the glowing swarm of bubbles emerges Nandor. Floating suspended, he’s looking at Guillermo with fear and revulsion in his eyes. Guillermo knows at once why he’s here.

Guillermo’s ashamed of the desire that has surged unabated for eleven years, unabated and unswayed by the carnival of horror. He’s ashamed of what and who he’s sacrificed to grovel before a master who, while old and possessing some minor superpowers, is dumb as a box of rocks and prone to being not very nice. And he is terrified that this is a gamble that’s not going to pay off.

There’s a hand cradling the side of his face. He opens his eyes to see La Llorona, staring wild-eyed at him.

Pulled under by the wave of raw grief, he takes a ragged breath in, which is kind of the #1 thing you’re not supposed to do underwater. Water rushes into his lungs and he realizes two things at once: one, that La Llorona is gone, and two, that he is drowning. He tries to find the surface, but he’s too cold and too deep and can't even begin to fathom which way is up. It’s blackness around him.

Suddenly, though, it dawns on him that he doesn’t care.

Cold is a function of Guillermo’s life at this point. Except in the summers, when he worships the shorter nights and spends his days laying out in the blazing sun in the hopes that he can store up enough warmth for the frigid months ahead, he is freezing. Winters are cold and wretched and exhausting; he scarcely sees the sun, and all the people who are outside are in the process of making their way towards inside.

Now, though, he feels divinely warm. He feels as if he’s had a glass or two of wine and is sitting before a blazing fire, but he also feels as if he’s being cradled close, tenderly (never mind by whom). If he has ever been this magnificently, beatifically happy, he certainly can’t remember it. It faintly occurs to him that this all might be a bad sign, considering how distinctly unhappy his current position is, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a point in fighting it. 

And then there’s a hand at the scruff of his neck dragging him up and out. It’s violent; he’s gasping and choking, his brain abruptly kicking back into the realization that something is deeply, deeply wrong.

His back connects with something solid. He’s lying at the beach looking up at where the stars would be if light pollution wasn’t a thing.

“Cold,” he manages between sharply painful breaths.

Nandor, kneeling next to him, has a hand on Guillermo’s face and a wild look in his eyes.

“It’s your deepest shame,” Guillermo murmurs. “That’s…that’s what it is. She is. She shows you. Um. Wants company. It’s a metaphor? Or something.” His body has apparently decided that coherency is a smaller concern than hypothermia now. In the grand scheme of things, he approves of this choice.

“Home,” whispers Nandor, whose brain similarly appears to be shorting out even though he’s got no fucking excuse for that one other than he is not-so-secretly a little bit dumb . He’s soaked through, heavy layers dripping all over the sand. He’s lost his boots somewhere in the chaos.

“Yeah,” Guillermo says, hoarse. “Let’s do that.”

*

Guillermo doesn’t know if it’s self-preservation or what, but he doesn’t quite come back to himself until the taps in the blue room’s en-suite are gushing away. Some familiar went through a major Art Deco phase in the 20s; it’s like the Great Gatsby threw up in here. There’s a whole lot of seafoam-green tile and wallpaper that might be intended to be abstract peacocks. Guillermo’s done a perfunctory post-sex wash-up in here, but never more than that. Nandor doesn’t say anything, just starts stripping off Guillermo’s wet clothes. Guillermo’s too cold and afraid to be turned on, but he can appreciate the moment regardless. He registers mild surprise that Nandor actually knows how running water works, though his sense of self-preservation does kick in enough to check that the bathwater is a temperature conducive to not killing him before he gets in. 

Nandor watches him settle into the water, eyes dark and pupils blown. 

“Get in,” orders Guillermo. Nandor has the sense to strip off his sodden clothes and obey, though he does nearly manage to slosh all the water over the sides of the tub as he does. 

The shaking is still really bad. Guillermo has vague memories of getting a hypothermia PSA in high school—he always had classmates whose power got shut off at some point in the winter months—and seems to remember that you shouldn’t ever warm a person up suddenly. It’s too much of a shock to the system.

“I need you to be…” Guillermo shivers, the remains of the Nandor-induced tsunami washing over him. “Um. Tender, I guess. With me. I would’ve said it before, but I don’t think you’d have listened.” And then he stares at Nandor, who stares back with lips slightly parted. Guillermo supposes he’s never actually seen his master being tender, save for with animals (over whom he tends to gush and coo even as Guillermo bodily drags him away from street cats determined to fuck up his shit) . He may not be capable. He does, however, reach out and gather Guillermo in close to him, cradling Guillermo against his chest. Nandor’s fingers brush under Guillermo’s chin, an invitation to tilt his head up.

Nandor kisses like a man drowning. Always has, probably, but Guillermo, as someone who’s historically probably kissed back in a similar way, hasn’t really noticed before.

For a little while he resolves not to look a gift horse in the mouth. It’s warm and he’s lying against Nandor’s chest and it has been a very, very long night. As the warmth slowly starts to return to his body and the making out slips from intent to lazy, though, his suspicions assert themselves inescapably.

“Did she get you too?”

“ _Get me_?”

“You know…the thing, where she shows you your greatest shame. You were underwater too, weren’t you? Pulling me out.” Guillermo feels himself flush.

Nandor makes a noncommittal noise and suddenly becomes very interested in kissing Guillermo again, which Guillermo is going to take as a probable yes. Guillermo’s willing to indulge them both in another round of gift-horse/mouth since lying against Nandor’s warm chest in the bath is substantially better than anywhere Guillermo’s been in a while. Nandor’s reptilian circulation system takes on the temperature of whatever is around it ; Guillermo’s always taken a sad, desperate pride in the fact that his master warms up substantially during sex.

Suddenly, Nandor pulls back with a pained noise. “Was that some seriously fucked-up yenta-ing all along?”

“…the…”

“That infernal woman!”

Guillermo presses his cheek to the radiant heat of Nandor’s chest. “You mean…when she saw us in the bush, she thought we should…?”

Nandor nods.

“I think that’s improbable at best. She wanted to make us miserable, after all. Or, well…at least she needed someone else to be anguished with her.”

It occurs to Guillermo then that maybe she _is_ making them miserable, giving them this when they all well know that it can’t stand on its own. But it’s late and he’s tired and this will all come home to roost eventually whether he likes it or not, so he relaxes against Nandor’s chest in the warm water and enjoys the moment. 

**Author's Note:**

>  **Content warning(s):** a character falls into water and feels like they’re drowning, though it’s all a bit metaphysical and they don’t actually drown. There's also a fair amount of guilt and shame (some Catholicism-related, some not), so tread lightly if that's not your bag.


End file.
